Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release  3^rd of October 2012

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au
 

Wheat deregulation is an act of economic warfare on Australia

The Australian government’s push to fully deregulate wheat exports betrays Australia’s wheat farmers to predatory global grain cartel companies and commodity speculators, charged Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today.

“This final act of wheat deregulation, to extinguish the last remaining regulatory mechanism of the old Wheat Board, is the latest blow to Australian industry, in the decades-long economic warfare offensive on Australia unleashed under Hawke and Keating,” he said.

“It is a calculated assault on Australia’s family farmers, our national food security, and our capacity to feed millions of people around the world.”

Isherwood said deregulation would be the final nail in the coffin of a once stable, regulated national wheat industry that was able to be a major, independent player in the global wheat market, out of reach of the multinational grain traders such as Cargill and Bunge.

“Every attack on the wheat industry’s regulatory protections since the privatisation of the Australian Wheat Board into AWB Ltd. in 1999 has been to profit the predatory grain cartel,” he said.

“The industry has been a big target of the British-directed drive to strip Australia of every protection under which our nation was once a powerful, agro-industrial economy.”

Isherwood explained, “The private grain cartel companies hated AWB and its counterpart the Canadian Wheat Board, because such national single desk arrangements protected those nations’ wheat growers from the predatory trading practices the cartel companies use to create wild market fluctuations that enable the traders to buy cheap off the growers and sell dear to customers, and generate enormous profits.”

(It was grain cartel companies including Cargill through their front U.S. Wheat Associates who blew up the scandal that was used to finally kill off the AWB, by feeding a Murdoch media journalist, Caroline Overington, with damaging information. “They obviously had an agenda,” Overington admitted to the March 24, 2009 Freedom of Speech conference in Sydney. “They wanted to see AWB destroyed.”)

“They successfully destroyed AWB, they now intend to get the government to strip away the last regulatory protection, and then the way will be clear for the cartel companies to destroy all remaining vestiges of collective grower power in Australia, such as Cooperative Bulk Handling (CBH) in Western Australia—the targeting of CBH is already underway.

“Food production is precious, in a world where a billion people are starving,” he said. “Under great leaders of previous generations, such as Country Party giant John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, food production was protected through government regulation, to give farmers the best possible chance to produce. Those leaders thought it was enough that farmers had to battle the elements—they shouldn’t have to battle predatory global traders too. This was the outlook that led the Australian government to establish the Wheat Board in the first place.”

Isherwood concluded, “It is absolutely necessary to fight the push by the government and global grain cartel for full wheat deregulation, but that fight is one part of a much broader fight against all of the deregulation policies that have caused so much destruction to Australia’s industries and communities. At stake is Australia’s survival as a nation with an industrial economy that can feed its people and more besides.

“The CEC is leading this fight. Our national resolution campaign, The Future of Australia: Develop or Die, calls for the repeal of all such destructive deregulation policies since Hawke and Keating. Every concerned Australian should confront their elected officials on where they stand on these issues, and if they are also opposed, what they intend to do about them. And there’s really only one thing to do: Join the CEC.”